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Bob Guccione: The surprising man behind the pubic wars

Porn king was a man of many contradictions

Penthouse publisher and founder Bob Guccione holds up his magazine Penthouse and Playboy magazine at a news conference announcing his anti-censorship campaign in 1986. The porn king was a man of contradictions. Photo: The Canadian Press

It started, as things sometimes do, with a visit to the Playboy Mansion.

Barry Avrich, a Canadian film director, had just made a documentary about Lew Wasserman, the Hollywood agent who helped invent the studio system, and Hugh Hefner wanted to meet him. Avrich would go to the Mansion frequently — he loved the Saturday night screenings of old movie classics — and slowly an idea began to take shape.

The more he knew Hefner, he says, the more he thought there might be a film in the life of Bob Guccione.

Guccione was the late publisher of Penthouse magazine, which was like Playboy in that it published photographs of naked women, but it also showed female genitalia as well as breasts.

They called it the Pubic Wars, with Guccione as the anti-Hefner: “Hefner was the guy in the smoking jacket who courted interesting writers, and Guccione was the guy that showed pubic hair,” as Avrich puts it.

That was the public image anyway. Guccione was raised in New Jersey and had a persona that included tight leather pants, an open shirt and gold chains down to his navel. (“I think people should realize that was a costume anyway,” his son, Bob Jr., said in a separate interview. “He did that because he knew it was an identity.”)

Avrich — a Canadian whose previous documentary subjects include Harvey Weinstein and Garth Drabinsky — says he’s interested in the rise and fall of ambitious men. He started doing research into Guccione, and then came to a decision.

“At Cannes a year ago, and I woke up and thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to make a film about him.’ It’s amazing that there’s been no book or no real documentary or film about this man.”

The result is Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story. Combining interviews with everyone from Guccione friend Alan Dershowitz to ex-Penthouse columnist Xaviera Hollander — the Happy Hooker herself, reminiscing about a ménage a trois with Guccione and his wife — it traces the career of a complex man who was a talented painter, a breakthrough photographer, a promoter of fusion energy, a world-class art collector, a movie producer, and host of a literary salon in one of the biggest private houses in New York City. At its height, his empire included such titles as the science journal Omni and the health magazine Longevity.

He also published photographs that showed pubic hair.

“He was known as pornographer,” Avrich acknowledges. “He had the first magazine to show genitalia. But he didn’t use the press to say ‘I’m also the guy launching Omni, Longevity, investing in fusion energy.’ His way of being recognized would be a Pulitzer Prize in journalism or Nobel prize for fusion energy.”

Guccione began his career as an artist in Italy — Filthy Gorgeous, which is being screened at the Toronto film festival, showcases his remarkably fluid Impressionistic works — and later in England. There he had the idea for a British version of Playboy and by the time he moved his operations to the U.S., he had established a style: gauzy photographs (taken by Guccione himself) of women undressing, but not looking at the camera. It gave them a voyeuristic bent, a naughtiness that was emphasized by the fact that he showed more than his rival did.

Penthouse, like Playboy, published journalism and stories by writers such as Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs, but it was the explicit sex that made it famous. A 1984 photo spread showing Miss America Vanessa Williams naked, enacting lesbian scenes, caused a sensation.

Guccione’s complexity could be seen in his 27,000-square-foot mansion, designed in Imperial Roman style, but filled with art masterpieces. His guests included Henry Kissinger and astronaut John Glenn. Filthy Gorgeous recalls a dinner table conversation between Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, debating writing styles.

“At his house, you were blown away by the art, you were blown away by the people around the dinner table, but he didn’t talk about it,” Avrich says. “He was extraordinarily private and quiet. He wasn’t out to make a name for himself the same way Hefner was.”

His downfall came through excessive ambition: A failed idea for an Atlantic City casino, the investment in fusion energy, his attempt to become a movie impresario with Caligula, a sexually saturated costume drama written by Gore Vidal and starring Malcolm McDowell, Sir John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole and a remarkably young looking Helen Mirren. It was panned by the critics and flopped at the box office.

“He chased a few white whales, my dad,” says Bob Jr.

Guccione eventually had to sell everything to pay the bills, and the magazine became, in Bob Jr.’s words, “incredibly pornographic.” Guccione died in 2010 at the age of 79.

He lives on in his work, however. Halfway through making Filthy Gorgeous, Avrich got a call from an investment banker named Jeremy Frommer who, on a whim, had bought a storage locker. It turned out to contain a trove of Guccione material that had been taken from his house: paintings, writing, notes, his original camera, thousands of items.

“What the lockers allowed me to do was get inside Bob Guccione’s head and read his diaries, read his personal papers, and see his sketches,” says Avrich.

“He was a brilliant artist. Aside from his paintings he was a magnificent sketch artist. There were tens of thousands of personal sketches during four decades of his life in New York. It gave me great insight into his obsessions and fantasies. There were hundreds showing the Playboy bunny guillotined, flushed down toilet, shot. He was constantly trying to find a way to be more important and better than Playboy.”

Guccione had saved everything — the lockers even included Vanessa Williams’ release form for the photographs — in a manner reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane, the fictional antihero of the film Citizen Kane, who also rose and fell in a great American story of hubris. At the beginning of Filthy Gorgeous, someone says Guccione’s life was like the last act of Kane.

If it’s true, Avirch says his Rosebud was a painting of a bather by Edgar Degas. Guccione saw a picture of it in a book when he was young, and he ripped out the page and folded it into his pocket. Years later, he bought the original at a Sotheby’s auction. It was one of the last things he sold when he was broke.

“He lost his entire fortune trying to be legitimate beyond the porn,” Avrich says. “It’s like Al Pacino in The Godfather, when the Corleone family is trying to go legitimate. ‘Just when you think you’re out, they suck you back in.’”